MONDAY, 28 JULY 1997, THE ATACAMA DESERT (Llano de la Paciencia)

"Uh, Steven, about your tent, did you just fold it up or...."

This quote of the day comes to you from Jim Teza, who had just
entered the Operations Truck after walking around the camp in the
early evening wind. Fortunately, Steven *had* just finished folding
up his tent, which did not seem to be surviving the high winds very
well. He is managing well enough though, since we have some extra
space in our other tents.

The primary focus of our work today was on locomotion and
communications testing. Instead of novice drivers in Pittsburgh,
graduate students Ben Shamah and Deepak Bapna got to dictate Nomad's
actions today. We sent Nomad through a variety of calisthenics;
circles, straight lines, moving backward and forward, up and down
hills, with wheels alternately stowed and deployed. While all this
was going on we were recording large amounts of telemetry that Ben and
Deepak will use to characterize Nomad's performance, e.g., motor
currents and network bandwidth usage. These experiments require the
work of many people to collect the data and make sure it is all right.
We learned just how important this was when we learned that we had
lost differential GPS during some of the test runs, and will have to
redo them.

Some of the younger team members are learning to appreciate
both the importance and tedium of taking experimental data. Steven,
an undergraduate on our team from the University of Iowa, learned how
to record the number of bits per second passing through our network by
pressing "up-arrow, enter" every second for 10 minutes at a time, many
times throughout the day. We are glad we can help inspire the next
generation of scientists with such fascinating activities.

Today we also welcomed some British videojournalists who are
visiting the Atacama as part of their documentary on weather
conditions throughout the world. The Atacama being the "driest desert
in the world", they were especially interested to hear of our
encounter with the rain on 14 July. Unfortunately it seems our image
logging facilities were not functioning at the time of the rainfall,
so we may not be able to provide them with actual views of the water
droplets on the panospheric camera. But I am sure we can get them
some useful information, and maybe even a picture of the rainbow that
formed shortly after the 20 droplets had hit.

Unfortunately none of the more than two kilometers travelled
by Nomad today will count toward our total. Nomad was completely
controlled by folks here in the desert, and we are only allowed to
count distances toward our overall total during times of remote or
autonomous driving.